New Left
It consisted of activists in the Western world who, in reaction to the era's liberal establishment, campaigned for freer lifestyles on a broad range of social issues such as feminism, gay rights, drug policy reforms, and gender relations.
It was associated with France Observateur, and its editor Claude Bourdet, who attempted to form a third position, between the dominant Stalinist and social democratic tendencies of the left, and the two Cold War blocs.
"[10] According to Leszek Kołakowski, noted critic of Marxist thought, Marcuse argued that since "all questions of material existence have been solved, moral commands and prohibitions are no longer relevant".
[12] Prominent New Left thinker Ernst Bloch believed that socialism would prove the means for all human beings to become immortal and eventually create God.
According to biographer Daniel Geary, Mills' works such as White Collar (1951), The Power Elite (1956), and The Sociological Imagination (1959) had a "particularly significant impact on New Left social movements of the 1960s".
[15] As a result of Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech denouncing Joseph Stalin, many abandoned the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and began to rethink orthodox Marxism.
Thompson was especially important in bringing the concept of a "New Left" to the United Kingdom in the summer of 1959 with a New Reasoner lead essay, in which he described a generation which never looked upon the Soviet Union as a weak but heroic Workers' State; but rather as the nation of the Great Purges and Stalingrad, of Stalin's Byzantine Birthday and of Khrushchev's Secret Speech; as the vast military and industrial power which repressed the Hungarian rising and threw the first sputniks into space....
[17]Later that year, Saville published a piece in the same journal which identified the emergence of the British New Left as a response to the increasing political irrelevance of socialists inside and outside the Labour Party during the 1950s, which he saw as being the result of a failure by the established left to come to grips with the political changes that had come to pass internationally after World War II, specifically, the economic expansion and the socio-economic legacy of the Attlee ministry:
The most important single reason for the miserable performance of the Left in this past decade is the simple fact of its intellectual collapse in the face of full employment and the welfare state at home, and of a new world situation abroad.
The Left in domestic matters has produced nothing of substance to offset the most important book of the decade – Crosland's "The Future of Socialism" – a brilliant restatement of Fabian ideas in contemporary terms.
In a 2010 retrospective, Stuart Hall wrote, "I was troubled by the failure of orthodox Marxism to deal adequately with either 'Third World' issues of race and ethnicity, and questions of racism, or with literature and culture, which preoccupied me intellectually as an undergraduate.
According to Robin Blackburn, "The decline of CND by late 1961, however, deprived the New Left of much of its momentum as a movement, and uncertainties and divisions within the Board of the journal led to the transfer of the Review to a younger and less experienced group in 1962.
"[19] Under the long-standing editorial leadership of Perry Anderson, New Left Review popularised the Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and other forms of Marxism.
"[23] Numerous Black British scholars attributed their interest in cultural studies to Hall, including Paul Gilroy, Angela McRobbie, Isaac Julien, and John Akomfrah.
[26] The New Left that developed in the following years was "a loosely organized, mostly white student movement that advocated for democracy, civil rights, and various types of university reforms, and protested against the Vietnam war".
On 2 December 1964 on the steps of Sproul Hall, Mario Savio delivered a speech with these famous passages:[T]he faculty are a bunch of employees, and we're the raw material!
The New Left in the United States also included anarchist, countercultural, and hippie-related radical groups such as the Yippies (who were led by Abbie Hoffman), the Diggers,[32] Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, and the White Panther Party.
[35] On the other hand, the Yippies (the name allegedly coming from Youth International Party) employed theatrical gestures, such as advancing a pig ("Pigasus the Immortal") as a candidate for president in 1968, to mock the social status quo.
[40] Todd Gitlin in The Whole World Is Watching in describing the movement's influences stated, "The New Left, again, refused the self-discipline of explicit programmatic statement until too late—until, that is, the Marxist–Leninist sects filled the vacuum with dogmas, with clarity on the cheap.
[48] With sexism being rampant in certain sections of the New Left,[49][50] women reacted to the lack of progressive gender politics with their own social intellectual movement.
Increasingly, feminist and gay rights groups became important parts of the Democratic coalition, thus satisfying many of the same constituencies that were previously unserved by the mainstream parties.
[52] Port Huron Statement participant Jack Newfield wrote in 1971 that "in its Weathermen, Panther and Yippee incarnations, [the New Left] seems anti-democratic, terroristic, dogmatic, stoned on rhetoric and badly disconnected from everyday reality".
Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic rock, embraced the sexual revolution, and some used drugs such as cannabis, LSD, and psilocybin mushrooms to explore altered states of consciousness.
The Yippies, who were seen as an offshoot of the hippie movements parodying as a political party, came to national attention during their celebration of the 1968 spring equinox, when some 3,000 of them took over Grand Central Terminal in New York, resulting in 61 arrests.
The Yippies, especially their leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, became notorious for their theatrics, such as trying to levitate the Pentagon at the October 1967 war protest, and such slogans as "Rise up and abandon the creeping meatball!"
[55] In 1962, Tom Hayden wrote its founding document, the Port Huron Statement,[26] which issued a call for "participatory democracy" based on non-violent civil disobedience.
[64] In certain ERAP projects, such as JOIN ("Jobs or Income Now") in uptown Chicago, SDSers were replaced by white working-class activists (some bitterly conscious that their poor backgrounds had limited their acceptance within "the Movement").
[64] Kirkpatrick Sale recalls that the most dispiriting feature of the ERAP experience was that, however much they might talk at night about "transforming the system", "building alternative institutions", and "revolutionary potential", the organizers knew their credibility on the doorstep rested on an ability to secure concessions from, and thus to develop relations with, the local power structures.
[67] West Berlin, an Allied-occupied island within socialist East Germany to which young men from both German states had moved to avoid conscription, in particular became a center of critical dissent from the rival social-democratic and communist party traditions.
[81] The New Left in Latin America sought to go beyond existing Marxist–Leninist efforts at achieving economic equality and democracy to include social reform and address issues unique to Latin America such as racial and ethnic equality, indigenous rights, the rights of the environment, demands for radical democracy, international solidarity, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism and other aims.
